1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to an encoder, a decoder, an encoding method and a decoding method for encoding and decoding pixel data, and more particularly to an encoder, a decoder, an encoding method and a decoding method for encoding and decoding pixel data with low amount of transmitting data and without data loss.
2. Description of the Related Art
For transmitting a digital image to receiver, the image data is encoded in the transmitter by an encoder. At the receiver a decoder is then used to decode the encoded data to restore the image data. When the encoder uses a lossless algorithm, the restored image is an exact copy of the original image. However, conventional lossless algorithms for encoding image data result in a large amount of data to be transmitted, which, in turn, requires a high bandwidth for the transmission channel. Therefore, it is economically desirable to develop a lossless encoder and decoder algorithm.